


Starlit Memories

by ruthlesslistener



Category: 2P Hetalia - Fandom, Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Character Study, Feliciano and Luciano are somewhat indistinguishable in this one, Other, the mind of a nation, vague af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:59:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8009095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruthlesslistener/pseuds/ruthlesslistener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Introspection is difficult to achieve if who you are does not fit with what you were before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starlit Memories

**Author's Note:**

> It's 12:00 a.m., the moon has risen to its highest form and I have become abstract.

There always comes a certain age where the clocks stop spinning and time slows down to a blurred haze.

For him, this must have been years ago. Maybe it was the age before; maybe it was the age after, or maybe it was the between-for him, it didn't really matter. Eras passed, hearts stopped and started, clocks clicked and creaked and groaned and faded into stillness, and yet he still breathed, and aged. Not in the body, maybe, but in the mind, certainly, old resentments and past wounds collecting new fuel, new fire, shifting and changing and flickering like a phoenix rising anew from the ashes of old battles.

And then there are the times that everything fades, and the present rushes in like a storm, unbreakable, unavoidable. These are the days where the sun is bright and the clocks still run with their merry tick-tocks, and he looks up into faces worn into the grooves of his memory and sees them anew, the past battles and conflict vaue bells ringing in the back of his head.

And he hates the numbness that comes with the loss of the past, hates the way it smoothes the edges of shattered glass deep within him, hates the way who he is and what he's done gets washed away, taken by the tides of tomorrow and what will come to be. He hates the way they dull him, hates the way it takes the richness from the timeslots still buried within his head, and he hates the way it turns strangers into friends, friends into enemies, hates the way he changes and shifts into something different, because he can still dream and breathe and think in the manner of time gone by and his very being aches, aches like he's had his bones shifted and resettled, and maybe he has, maybe, maybe, maybe.

(But how is he supposed to know? How is he supposted to act when memories he thought lost pierce him, twist him with the thoughts and emotions of someone different than him, someone long gone? He who was then is dead, and he who is now is dying. The sands trickle through the hourglass, his life is bled from him, and he continues, each step a jolt into a new body, a new person, a new mind, but a crippled mind, a mind still twisted and aged and tortured with years gone past.)

There's no way out, but there's no way in, either, and he, for all his bravado, is lost.

And maybe that's why he spends the wee hours of the morning encompassed in the darkness of the night; maybe that's why he perches on rooftops with his face turned to the moon until he is tired, too tired, and slips away to coil up under sheets as vapid and meaningless to him as cool morning mist. He's a creature of time, a creature of habit whose days click and tick and trickle away in daylight hours, and the stars offer a quiet refuge, a timeless void for him to sit within their company of eternity and just be. 

Their light is silver and gold and red and blue. He studies them, his own eyes twin stars blinking back at him, and breathes. Back before, this would have been a sweet victory, the cool night air in his lungs his own little victory. He breathes, and gasps out sounds that are not words or emotions or anything that can be heard; he exhales silence, a scream, a call of acknowledgement. Because the moon and the stars and the celestial bodies are timeless; they have seen everything from what was then and what was before and what is now, and in their light, everything is the same. Everything is together, and the quicksand tunnels of his memory fade together into clarity, because right now, with the silver light casting everything into shadowy silhoettes, he could be anywhere. He could be anytime. He could be anyone.

And the restless shadows flitting within him quiet, fold into perfect unity, and become still.


End file.
